Progress In Electromagnetics Research Letters, Vol.

6, 165174, 2009

DUAL-BAND AND WIDEBAND DESIGN OF A PRINTED DIPOLE ANTENNA INTEGRATED WITH DUAL-BAND BALUN X. Li, L. Yang, S.-X. Gong, and Y.-J. Yang National Key Laboratory of Antennas and Microwave Technology Xidian University Xian, Shaanxi 710071, P. R. China AbstractA dual-band printed dipole antenna with integrated balun feed is given in this paper. First, the fork-shaped slot is etched on the arms of the printed dipole antenna to achieve the dual-band operation with resonances at WLAN bands. The radiating element without balun is optimized and operates at 2.4 GHz (21802750 MHz) and 5.2 GHz (5040 MHz5480 MHz) where return loss is less than 10 dB. In order to get a larger bandwidth, a modied Marchand balun is introduced for dual-band operation, which can provide two resonances in each band to enhance impedance bandwidth. By co-designing the radiating element with the dual-band balun, an antenna covering 21502750 MHz and 50506230 MHz bands has been achieved. The design equations for modied balun have been presented and agreement between calculation and measurement is good.

1. INTRODUCTION In both military and commercial applications there have been an evergrowing demands for antennas that possess the following highly desirable attributes: multiband or broadband, compact size, and low prole. To fulll the demands, a single antenna using a single feed point that covers multiband is needed. The main challenge in antenna design is to satisfy the bandwidth requirement of the various systems. Because printed microstrip antennas have been widely investigated and are attractive for their conguration advantages, printed dipole antennas are preferred in this design.
Corresponding author: X. Li (xixi1928@163.com).

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In recent years there have been rapid developments in wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. WLAN can provide quick and easy wireless connection to computer, or systems in a local environment where a xed communication infrastructure does not exist, or where such access is not permitted [1]. In order to conform to IEEE 802.11b/g and 802.11a WLAN standards, multiband antennas operating at 2.4 GHz (24122484 MHz), 5.2 GHz (51505350 MHz) and 5.8 GHz (57255825 MHz) frequency bands are highly desirable. Several printed antennas for WLAN applications have been reported in the literature [211]. A dipole antenna for WLAN 2.4/5.2 GHz is presented in [2]; measured bandwidth at the lower and upper frequency bands are 9.3 and 5.1% respectively, which are insucient for the target in this paper. Other dual-band antennas without balun proposed in [3 5] are unsuitable for connection to a singled transceiver. In this paper, a dual-band printed dipole antenna integrated with modied Marchand balun [12] has been presented; the balun can provide two resonances in each band to enhance impedance bandwidth. The technique used in this paper only can be seen in single-band antennas [13, 14]. Although some dual-band antennas with printed balun have been reported [2, 15], unfortunately, the eect of the balun has never been explained clearly in those papers. In this design, by co-designing the radiating element with the dual-band balun, a printed dipole antenna covering 21502750 MHz and 50506230 MHz has been achieved. In the following, the design equations of the dual-band balun have been given and there is a good agreement between calculation and measurement.

MS1 1.6 7

MS2

5 4

(a)

(b)

Figure 1. The conguration of the proposed antenna (a) radiating element (b) balun.

7.6 2.8

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2. ANTENNA DESIGN 2.1. Radiating Element The conguration of the radiating element is shown in Figure 1(a). The Fork-shaped slot is etched on the arms of the dipole antenna, achieving the dual-band operation with resonances at 2.4 GHz (21802750 MHz) and 5.2 GHz (50405480 MHz) (Figure 2). The overall dimensions of the structure are 55 35 mm2 . The geometrical parameters of the radiating element are optimized using HFSS in an attempt to achieve design goals at both 2.4 and 5 GHz frequency bands.

Figure 2. Simulated return loss of radiating element without balun. At rst, by carefully selecting the printed dipole arms and width, the printed dipole antenna can operate in dierent bands. With the presence of the fork-shaped slot, two additional dipole arms are obtained. As can be seen in Figure 3 and Figure 4, the longer path length (L1 + L2 ) determines the centre frequency of the lower band, whereas the shorter path length (L3 ) determines the centre frequency of the higher band. The simulated input impedance of radiating element without balun can be seen in Figure 5. It should be noted that although the dipole antenna without balun has a reasonably large bandwidth, as can be seen in Figure 2, it is far from sucient for the targeted application here. 2.2. Balun The balun is based on Marchand balun [6], which essentially is a microstrip to co-planar strip line (CPS) transition with associated /4stubs. In this design, this stub is replaced with a true open circuit. The

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Figure 3. Simulated return loss of the radiating element for various L1 .

Figure 4. Simulated return loss of the radiating element for various L3 . CPS line, with characteristic impedance ZCPS = 113 and electrical length (l = 115.6 ) at 2.4 GHz, rotates the impedance of the radiating element seen in Figure 5 into the values with input resistance (RL+CPS ) closed to 50 at both 2 and 5 GHz (Figure 6) using design equation as follows: ZL + jZCPS tan(l) ZL+CPS = ZCPS (1) ZCPS + jZL tan(l) As can be seen from Figure 6, the reactance (XL+CPS ) is about j 70 at 2.4 GHz. At rst, the open microstrip stub (MS1), with

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Figure 5. Simulated input impedance of radiating element (ZL ).

Figure 6. Simulated input impedance of radiating element and CPS line (ZL+CPS ). characteristic impedance ZMS1 = 70 and electrical length lMS1 = 45 at 2.4 GHz, adds the impedance Zin,MS1 = jZMS1 cot(lMS1 ) to XL+CPS , moving the entire band closer to 50 . Subsequently, at the upper frequency band, ZMS2 and lMS2 are determined to compensate reactance according to (2) Zin = ZMS2 (Zin,MS1 + ZL+CPS ) + jZMS2 tan(lMS2 ) ZMS2 + j (Zin,MS1 + ZL+CPS ) tan(lMS2 ) (2)

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Fortunately, the reactance (XL+CPS ) is closed to zero at the upper frequency band, so ZMS2 is determined as 50 , and lMS2 is arbitrary value. The complete balun is shown in Figure 1(b). As can be seen from Figure 7, the proposed balun can provide two resonances at 2.5 and 5.8 GHz to achieve dual-band characteristics. The simulated input impedance of complete antenna is shown in Figure 8.
-5

-10

Return loss [dB]

-15

-20

-25

-30 2 3 4 5 6 7

Frequency [GHz]

Figure 7. Simulated return loss of the proposed dual-band balun.

Figure 8. Simulated input impedance of complete antenna (Zin ).

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Figure 9. The photo of the proposed antenna.

Figure 10. Simulated and measured return loss of complete antenna. 3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Figure 9 shows the prototype of the optimized printed dipole antenna, which is printed on the substrate of thickness h = 1 mm and relative permittivity r = 2.65. Figure 10 shows the frequency response of the reection coecient (S11 ) at the input port of the balun. In the lower resonant band, the measured bandwidth for S11 < 10 dB is about 600 MHz (2.152.75 GHz), which is corresponding to 24.6% of the centre frequency of 2.435 GHz. For the higher band, an impedance bandwidth of 21% (for S11 < 10 dB), corresponding to the frequency range 5.056.23 GHz, was also obtained. As a result, the impedance bandwidth covers the 2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN operations. The measured far-eld radiation patterns at 2.4, 5.2 and 5.8 GHz frequency bands are illustrated in Figure 11. Almost omnidirectional

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(a) E-plane

(b) H-plane

Figure 11. Measured far-eld radiation patterns at 2.4, 5.2 and 5.8 GHz (a) E -plane (b) H -plane.
6

measured gain
5

Gain [dB]

0 2.0 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 5.0 5.2 5.4 5.6 5.8 6.0 6.2 6.4

Frequency [GHz]

Figure 12. Measured peak gain of the proposed antenna. patterns in the H -plane are observed for both operation frequencies. Figure 12 shows the measured peak gain of the proposed antenna. The measured gain varies from 0.51.9 dB across the frequency band from 2.12.8 GHz, and 3.65.6 dB across the frequency band from 56.3 GHz. 4. CONCLUSIONS A novel wide- and dual-band printed dipole antenna for WLAN operations has been proposed in this paper. By using a modied Marchand balun for dual-band operation, two resonances are obtained

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in each band, giving a wide impedance bandwidth. Detailed depiction of the radiating element and the eect of the balun have been presented. The concept is easily extended to other frequency band applications. REFERENCES 1. Prommak, C., J. Kabara, D. Tipper, and C. Charnsripinyo, Nextgenner-ation wireless LAN system design, Proc. MILCOM, Vol. 1, 473477, 2002. 2. Chen, H. M., J. M. Chen, P. S. Cheng, and Y. F. Lin, Feed for dual-band printed dipole antenna, Electron. Lett., Vol. 40, 13201322, 2004. 3. Suh, S. Y., A. E. Waltho, L. Krishnamurthy, D. Souza, S. Gupta, H. K. Pan, and V. K. Nair, A miniaturized dual-band dipole antenna with a modied meander line for laptop computer application in 2.5 and 5.5 GHz WLAN band, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Int. Symt., 26172620, 2006. 4. Zhang, Z., M. F. Iskander, J. C. Langer, and J. Mathews, Dualband WLAN dipole antenna using an internal matching circuit, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., Vol. 53, 18131818, 2005. 5. Su, S. W. and J. H. Chou, Low cost at metal-plate dipole antenna for 2.4/5-GHz WLAN operation, Microw. Opt. Tech. Lett., Vol. 50, 16861687, 2008. 6. Liu, W. C., Optimal design of dualband CPW-fed Gshaped monopole antenna for WLAN application, Progress In Electromagnetics Research, PIER 74, 2138, 2007. 7. Wu, Y. J., B. H. Sun, J. F. Li, and Q. Z. Liu, Triple-band omni-directional antenna for WLAN application, Progress In Electromagnetics Research, PIER 76, 477484, 2007. 8. Wang, F. J. and J. S. Zhang, Wide band cavity-baked patch antenna for PCS/IMI2000/2.4 GHz WLAN, Progress In Electromagnetics Research, PIER 74, 3946, 2007. 9. Ren, W., Compact dual-band slot antenna for 2.4/5 GHz WLAN applications, Progress In Electrimagnetics Research B, Vol. 8, 319327, 2008. 10. Gao, J. P., X. X. Yang, J. S. Zhang, and J. X. Xiao, A printed volcano smoke antenna for UWB and WLAN communications, Progress In Electromagnetics Research Letters, Vol. 4, 5561, 2008. 11. Jolani, F., A. M. Dadgarpour, and H. R. Hassani, Compact M-

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